Medical Journal Article Sent Prosecutor Sleuthing

It was a medical journal article that sent a prosecutor sleuthing in 1986.

Last month, his persistence led to murder charges against the research subject: a mother whose five children had been listed as victims of sudden infant death syndrome.

Waneta Hoyt, identified only as “H” in the 1972 article, was jailed in lieu of $100,000 bail, accused of suffocating the babies--one after the other--nearly a quarter-century ago.

William J. Fitzpatrick, then an assistant prosecutor in nearby Onondaga County, read the article while researching possible defenses he might face in the case of Stephen Van Der Sluys, who was accused of killing his 15-month-old daughter in 1979.

The girl’s death was initially classified as sudden infant death syndrome, the unexplained death of a child. As Fitzpatrick prepared to prosecute Van Der Sluys for murder, an expert witness told him about the article in the journal Pediatrics.

The article chronicled the SIDS deaths of five infants in the same family, a premise Fitzpatrick could not accept.

“I was dumbfounded after reading the article,” he said. “I said, ‘These children have clearly been murdered.’ I just never forgot about the case.”

Although the article didn’t identify the mother, Fitzpatrick noted that the author was Dr. Alfred Steinschneider, who at the time worked at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse, the Onondaga County seat.

He thought the family might also be from Onondaga County, but he put his suspicions aside after he left the district attorney’s office for private practice.

When he became district attorney of Onondaga County in 1992, he followed up on his earlier suspicions, checking with the county morgue on infant deaths in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

From his list, Fitzpatrick eliminated cases that didn’t fit the description in the article, until he was left only with the names of the Hoyt children. Then he subpoenaed hospital records of the last Hoyt child to die, in 1971.

The description of the child’s case fit with the description in an autopsy report Fitzpatrick traced to Steinschneider, who had examined the last two of Hoyt’s children.

Fitzpatrick tracked Hoyt to Tioga County, 50 miles south of his own Onondaga County, and notified the local district attorney, Robert J. Simpson.

Simpson launched an investigation at the end of 1992. He filed five second-degree murder charges against Hoyt in March.

“I had no idea if she was alive or not, but it was something I was compelled to see to a finish,” Fitzpatrick said of his efforts.

The Hoyt babies died between 1965 and 1971. One child lived 27 months; none of the others survived beyond four months.

“It’s an absolute certainty that these slayings would have gone on undetected forever without Mr. Fitzpatrick’s involvement,” said state police Lt. Thomas P. Kelly, who helped lead the investigation. “He was the catalyst. He’s the only reason this was brought to our attention.”

Fitzpatrick contends Hoyt has Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, a psychiatric condition in which a parent is driven to harm his or her children to get attention and sympathy.

Steinschneider is now considered one of the world’s experts on SIDS and is president of the American SIDS Institute in Atlanta.